“I wouldn’t live in such a stingy State.”
“You may have to some day. Wait until Mississippi has been overrun with greedy hunters, calling themselves sportsmen, from every part of the Union, as Maine has, and see if your lawmakers do not wake up to the necessity of protecting the little game they will leave you. If those pot-hunters were let alone, there wouldn’t be anything for a fellow to shoot after a while. Our laws are strict.”
“Are they always obeyed?”
“Of course not. Last winter a party of Indians camped on the headwaters of the Brokenstraw, and killed nearly a hundred moose. When the game-constables got after them, they ran over to Canada. But the worst destroyers of game are the city sportsmen. They shoot at everything that comes within range of their guns, throw away the trout they can’t eat, and the money they pay for food and guides doesn’t begin to cover the damage they do.”
It was a pleasant scene that was spread out before the gaze of Don Gordon and Walter Curtis on that bright September morning. They stood upon the brink of a high bluff jutting out into one of the Seven Ponds, which, at that day, were not as widely known among the class of men whom Walter had just been denouncing as they are at the present time. There was a hotel at the lower pond, but it was patronized only by adventurous sportsmen who, as a rule, lived up to the law, and took no more fish and game than they could dispose of. The men who are willing to endure almost any hardship, who brave all sorts of weather and the miseries of “buck-board” traveling over corduroy roads, for the sake of spending a quiet month in the woods, are not the ones who boast of the number of fish they catch or the amount of game they kill. A hard fight with a three-pound trout, or a single deer brought down after a week’s arduous hunting, affords them more gratification than they would find in a whole creelful of “finger-lings,” or a cart-load of venison killed on the runways.
The boys were in the midst of an almost unbroken wilderness. On their right a noble forest, known only to the hardy lumberman and a few hunters and trappers, stretched away to the confines of Canada. In front was the pond (it was larger than Diamond Lake, whose sluggish waters had once floated a fleet of Union gunboats), and from the glade below them on their left arose the smoke of the fire over which some of their companions were cooking a late breakfast. A deep silence brooded over the woods, broken only by an occasional splash made by a trout as he arose to the surface of the pond to seize some unwary insect, and snatches of a plantation melody from Hopkins, who sang as he superintended the frying of the bacon:
“Big fish flutter when he done cotch de cricket;
Bullfrog libely when he singin’ in de thicket;
Mule get slicker when de plantin’ time ober;
Colt mighty gaily when you turn him in de clover;